The keepers of the trad flame

BEING THERE:With more than 120 years of storytelling and music behind them, Mick 'Micil' Quinn and Sam Andrews are happy their treasure troves are still loved, writes Róisín Ingle.

DOWN IN Mullaghbawn in the belly of south Armagh lives a man called Mick Quinn, a storyteller of great renown. And in that village, nestled in the shadow of Slieve Gullion, Mick Quinn, known to all as Micil, spends his days making up stories and songs in his head. He tells these stories to audiences at festivals in Dublin and in Wexford and in Leitrim and above in Scotland and below in London and across in America. Spend enough time in his company and you find yourself imitating the flow of his words, the rhythm of his stories. Like the one about the first ostrich in Mullaghbawn or the one about his father's Spanish ass, but especially the one about his sheepdog Ned and the time the aul pooch got shot in the head for falling in love with a dog that was way above his station.

At 82, with more than half a century of tale-telling behind him, Micil's version of this shaggy dog story is more polished. The Man that Shot the Dogis based on a real life event that happened around 15 years ago and the story won him first prize in 1993 at the All-Ireland fleadh in Clonmel.

As though it's the first time he has told it or as though he's just made it up on the spot, neither of which is actually the case, Micil stands in his kitchen in Mullaghbawn giving the background to the story of the time his sheepdog Ned had a romance with a neighbour's pedigree Labrador.

"The owner of the bitch was waiting for a pedigree sire but my dog went over and did the job, gave her a litter of puppies," he recalls. "But there was no need to shoot poor Ned just for making love. Have you ever had a dog? To shoot another man's dog is an awful thing, a terrible thing. There was nothing I could do at the time, so I composed a story to let out all the badness that was in me."

The "badness" in the story comes in the form of a colourful scattering of verbal invective, insults fired like so much buckshot at the man that shot the dog:

"May piles surround his big backside, like strawberries on their stalk,

And every time that he lifts that gun, his stomach it may balk,

And as he goes a-hunting over heather hills or bog,

May the diarrhoea skite, with all its might, from that man who shot the dog"

After that line, you can only pick at the fresh cherry scones Micil offers from a brown paper bag. The dog survived, incidentally, and lived to be 17 years old while the song was never off the radio. "It was the best thing that happened me," says Micil sitting down to slowly demolish a chicken curry dinner and explain the workings of the hiring fairs in "the hungry 1930s".

"You never heard of a hiring fair?" he asks. "Well, what happened was you stood there at the fair in Newry or Newtownhamilton and a man came around and looked at you. I was 14 when I was sold for £12 and 10 shillings for six months to go and work on a farm. If you didn't finish your six months you got no money, so that's an idea of what times were like".

HE RECOUNTS learning his first songs and stories, picking them up "by osmosis" from old men, among them his father, John Ned Quinn. "At that time there were old men sitting in céilí houses, telling stories of the fairies or a big black dog with red eyes, stories told so that when you were leaving for home at night, the life would be scared clean out of you," he says. There were songs, too. "Each person had their party piece and they sang them over and over, so myself and my brother got to know them by heart," he says. Then there were the flax pulling parties held in the area where his father danced The Trip to the Cottage, The Sweets of Mayand The Queen's Wedding, dances archivists would later visit the area to record.

Micil explains about the flax-pulling socials: "What happened was you would have a field of flax, your neighbour would have a field of flax and someone else would have a field of flax. About 14 of the men would come and tackle your field, then they'd go to someone else's the next. You'd say 'I'll pull the Saturday', someone else would say 'I'll pull the Sunday' and when it all finished up they would have a flax-pulling dance." (Micil could read out a shopping list in his rolling south Armagh accent and his mesmerising cadence would make it sound fascinating).

In the early 1970s, when it was feared the stories and the songs and the dances might be lost, Micil and his friend, the late John Campbell, set up a local branch of Comhaltas. "It's great to be telling stories and people laughing and knowing that you are passing down something valuable to another generation," he says. "We started composing our own then, people got too smart for the ghosts and the fairy stories, so we wrote songs with humour, to make people laugh. It's in great demand now." He says he can look at a room full of people and know how the story will go down. "The audience is very important, if they don't give you the real attention then you can't tell a story. You see I can sing a song in the car and no one listening to me at all, but you can't tell a story to yourself." His curry eaten, Micil is polite but firm, saying he needs time to get ready for the event tonight at which people like him will be honoured as "Keepers of the Tradition". The night is a cornerstone of the annual Armagh Festival of Song, held this year as a tribute to the late Tommy Makem, who died last August.

So you leave Micil Quinn and wander down to O'Hanlon's Bar in Mullaghbawn where a local woman is holding court at the bar with her own stories. She is drinking a glass of white wine with ice and she keeps saying she is going home but stays on her stool, no intention of budging. She says she likes to drink in the one place. "My spot," she tells those assembled, "is the Quayside Inn, that's my stall . . . and the Newry Golf Club, that's my two stalls and this here is my stall so that's three stalls . . . hee hee hee." Then someone says they saw her hanging out her underwear on the line earlier in the day and she cackles with mischief and sings a song called Maggie's Flannel Drawers. "They were tattered and torn, round the gearbox they were worn" she sings and the place collapses; drink is spilt with laughter on counters and tables.

AWAY UP IN a house a mile outside Newry, Sam Andrews is getting ready for his big night, going through his ancient songbooks and playing his rare five-button accordion. He has been in the local band in an area called the Commons for 73 years. "It might be a record, it might," says the 85-year-old. "But there could be other people in bands just as long.

"Back in the early days, I was playing wee tunes on the tin whistle or the harmonica," he remembers. "My father would sing songs and hymns and once I heard him sing I very quickly could remember the tune, and once I could remember it I could play it. It was a great gift that I was born with."

He still goes to band practice once a week in the local Orange Hall, although for health reasons he's not been able to march these past five years. "It's just something you do," he says. "Like some people play football or go fishing, we play music. I am reared on it. We had nothing else in the early days, no electric light, no motor cars and you had a very quiet life in the country back in the 1920s and 1930s. You made your own sport, just a wee bit of craic with music and song."

Later that night, Sam Andrews meets Micil Quinn for the first time at the City Hotel, Armagh. Posing for a photograph, Micil and Sam chat easily together, appreciating each other's gifts and commitment to the separate traditions handed down to them by their fathers.

Micil, who received a Keepers of the Tradition award last year, has the audience in fits with a story that features vintage RTÉ current affairs programme Today Tonightand presenter Olivia O'Leary, about the time he was courting a girl in Hackballscross. Sam sings an old Irish ballad, accompanying himself on the accordion. "This evening we can say to Sammy Andrews over his long life, well done!" his citation reads. "You have done us all proud, all traditions, all aspirations under the great common brotherhood of song." Sam's wife watches with tears in her eyes as her husband accepts his scroll.

"Our ethos in the festival isn't to celebrate difference," says Peter Makem, nephew of Tommy, one of the organisers of the festival. "We like to concentrate on what is deeply common to all our artists, so that the singers, storytellers, songwriters and song collectors are honoured for their art alone." Among those also honoured that evening are singer Len Graham, songwriter Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, singer Briege Murphy and two Cork musicians, Pat Kelleher and Dan O'Sullivan.

THE FOLLOWING night, a Saturday, torrential rain is bouncing off the corrugated tin roof of the old cow shed up on a hill in Mullyard outside Keady in south Armagh. Inside, the floor is strewn with sawdust, there is a large pot bubbling on a small gas stove and an audience has gathered for a night of "stew and song". Pat Kelleher and Dan O'Sullivan are on stage singing Peggy Gordonand The Auld Triangle. Joan McDermott from the Irish Traditional Music Archive has travelled from Dublin for the night to see her friend Micil. "He is one of a rare breed," she says. "He is representative of a way of life that is alien to most people now. We've already recorded a good portion of his stories and songs with him and we'll be up fairly soon to get more."

Later, the crowd and the musicians in the shed retire to play and sing and tell stories around a roaring fire further up the hill in Tossie's cottage, the old Makem family homestead. It has been lovingly restored by the family, from the half-door to the wooden settle bed beside the fire. Micil stands, lit only by flickering flames, captivating the small audience with another story.

"It's a lovely life," he told me earlier. "My wife died coming up now three years ago and I am living on my own, so I love when people come and invite you to places to tell stories. To London or Scotland or Leitrim or Wexford or even America. I am usually lifted at the door and taken away and put up somewhere and it costs me no money and I don't charge anything - I don't think at 82 years of age I am worth anything. I get my pension every Monday and it does me lovely and as long as I am fit to spend it I am happy."

He's in demand at festivals all over the country and this Friday, because it's the last Friday of the month, he'll be in the cowshed-turned-story-telling-parlour of a woman he calls "Miss Bridget Brady" in nearby Meigh.

Way down in Mullaghbawn, in the belly of south Armagh, there lives a story teller called Micil Quinn, a conscientious keeper of the traditions, a man who carries his inheritance in his head. And he's not the only one.